Director Jacques Tourneur’s horror thriller is probably one of the most unique and menacing thrillers about a woman’s inherent ferocity and rage ever made. “Cat People” is filled to the brim with metaphor and symbolism, from the parallels of Simone Simon’s character Irena’s to a black panther stuck in a cage, right down to a kitten confined in a small paper box by Irena’s husband to be Oliver. After surprising her with the pet as a gift, the cat discovers that it hates Irena, and she it. More suitably though, the two aren’t kindly to being tied down and given to domestic masters.
Val Lewton’s classic character study of a woman’s chaotic and feral rage and sexuality unraveling before our eyes is an often brilliant tale that plays with the aesthetic as it unravels. From the beginning when we meet Irena and gander upon her environment, she’s a woman struggling to fit in with her surroundings and embracing the wild cats of her local zoo. As she frequents a psychologist who breaks away at her suppressed sexual urges, Lewton’s film becomes much darker and menacing. Rooms gradually grow shrouded in shadows while set pieces are much more claustrophobic and confining.
Irena has been dreading for years her fate as one of a legacy of cat people that could become lycanthrophic monsters within time, despite their best efforts to battle their urges. What’s worse is that Irena becomes ever more confined within her new marriage to Oliver, as well as mistrusting, thus allowing her to slowly embrace her more monstrous appetites and cravings. As random victims are attacked by what seems like a giant cat along the city, we’re given a very taut and creepy mystery that asks us to re-think what we know about Irena and perhaps our own ideas of Irena’s psyche.
Is she merely going insane and has managed to free the local Black Panther from its cage thanks to the forgetful zoo keeper? Or has she now begun transforming in to a man size Panther that will begin preying on innocent victims and knocking off the people in her life that have caused her most grief? “Cat People” works as a deliberately paced horror film that examines its protagonist before it decides to unleash her as a villain, and Simone Simon provides a very memorable turn in what is easily Val Lewton’s most brilliant and subtly sexual horror films ever made.